A woman should be scared: maternal ambivalence in Under the Shadow

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mothers in horror films have been theorized as monsters through concepts such as the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) and the monstrous-maternal. In this paper, I examine how this figuration of the maternal is taken up in the British-Iranian horror film Under the Shadow (dir. Babak Anvari, 2016). The film hybridizes the ‘maternal horror film’ with the genre of the Iran-Iraq war film, which also bears a complex relation to the figure of the mother. Drawing on the concept of maternal ambivalence, I argue that Under the Shadow posits in the mother protagonist and the feminine jinn (spirit) that haunts her a tension that unsettles the longstanding dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers in horror films. The film’s ambivalent position on mothers is expressive of a general cultural ambivalence toward mothers in post-revolutionary Iranian cultural politics.